The unruly songbird
new pieces of my own, which can be painfully difficult sometimes. Most of my past songs have been very autobiographical, but on this record, apart from some songs about my kids, they’re less about me and more about the wider world. The songs are facing outward more, rather than naval gazing. It’s also a bit more hopeful than some things I’ve done before.’’
Having other people contribute to the songs was oddly liberating, she says. ‘‘It meant that I didn’t have to delve into my own psychology so much. I let other people do the work and I could just focus on singing the songs, which was great fun, because I got to really throw my voice around on a lot of these songs.’’
This habit of messing with pitch and rhythm and throwing her vocals into unexpected places reminds me of another great Canadian singer: the reclusive Mary Margaret O’Hara, whose 1988 album Miss America is one of my favourite records. ‘‘Oh, my God!’’ blurts Wainwright. ‘‘I couldn’t be more pleased that you said that! That’s one of the best records ever made, of all time, I think. The way her voice swoops off and stops and starts, and comes in so strangely Wainwright wrote a suite of songs about the guy. It’s her way of exploring intense emotions, she says, whether it be family discord, or the painful death of her mother from cancer. around the beat. She’s always been a great inspiration to me.’’
Goodnight City is Wainwright’s most stylistically diverse album to date. This could have led to an incoherent listening experience, but her voice is the common thread that holds it all together.
Around The Bend is the countrytinged raw folk blast Wainwright built her name on, full of frank admissions of a drug-addled past, while So Down rages with full-on New York glam, a shotgun marriage between early Roxy Music and Horses-era Patti Smith.
‘‘Yeah, and Sonic Youth, too, I think, with that guitar and the pronounced New York accent and attitude. People put me in the folk category because of what my parents did and because I played a bunch of acoustic guitar early on, but there are many other types of music I’ve always adored. I mean, I coulda rebelled, and only played loud electric guitar as a kind of ‘f... you’ to my family history, but really, that’s just one part of me among many. I wanted to show more of those personalities on this record.’’
Other standouts? A eulogy to a friend who died of cancer, Traveller recycles the chord progression from David Bowie’s Sorrow to fine effect, while Wainwright’s reading of Beth Orton’s Alexandria recalls an emotionally shattered Emmylou Harris. And Franci and Window are paeans to Wainwright’s fierce, obsessive love of her two young sons.
‘‘Really, so much of what I’m trying to accomplish now is figuring out the way to incorporate motherhood into my artistry. It was an issue my own mother struggled with. How can you be a mother and also be an artist, given that both are gonna be hindered by the other, to an extent? I’m either not able to work very much or I’m having to leave my kids at home when I go on the road. It’s a sacrifice that needs to be made, but I want these two roles to co-exist as comfortably as possible.’’
There are other demands on her time. Wainwright is also an actor, appearing in Martin Scorsese’s Aviator and the Emmy-winning 2014 HBO series Olive Kitteridge.
She is currently finishing off a memoir, tentatively entitled Stories I Might Regret Telling You.
And the touring can be relentless, so these days, she brings her kids. On the day I talk to Wainwright, she suggests a New Zealand tour is on the cards. It has since been confirmed she’s only coming as far as Australia to play some shows this month, the extra hop across the ditch having been deemed too expensive.
It will be, she says, a homecoming of sorts. Near the end of her album, there’s a jazz-damaged love song to her bassist husband, Brad Albetta, who produced the record.
‘‘We made love in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide before the dawn; before the children came along…,’’ she sings, over-sharing as always, her mad songbird voice swooping and trilling, like Edith Piaf covering Ella Fitzgerald.
‘‘Oh, yeah, and the reason I sing those lines is because the last time I was in Australia, my husband and I were feverishly trying to conceive. We were having sex, like… all the time! And it worked, obviously, because our youngest son was conceived there.
‘‘When we come down there to play in Australia in March, I’ll be bringing him back home to his native land.’’